Best supporting spook?
Acceptable as a career kick-starter for an afterlife in show biz, but ghosts have egos, too, and they require stroking as much as any Hollywood A-lister's. Which brings us to Jacob Marley—the shackled spirit who first haunts skinflint Ebenezer Scrooge and is bumped to background billing behind his one-time partner in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol—now headlining Tom Mula's revisionist fable, Jacob Marley's Christmas Carol.
Staged at Las Vegas Little Theatre's Fischer Black Box Theatre, Mula's rewiring of Dickens' holiday vehicle mischievously examines a question of basic literary fairness: Is moral justice served when, given that Marley and Scrooge are both miserable, miserly old coots, only the latter earns a shot at redemption, while the former is sentenced to eternal imprisonment in chains?
Mula rights the wrong as hell-bound Marley (Robert Cox), weighted down by the cash boxes he worshipped and the links of bitterness he "forged one by one" in life, is additionally saddled with Bogle (Katie Harper), a nattering sprite who embeds herself in his ear, exhorting him to accept a deal offered by the Record Keeper (Tony Blosser) that can bring about his own salvation: Reform the rancid Scrooge (Brian Scott) on Christmas Eve.
Oy vey. But the poor spook's got the lead at last.
Beyond merely updating or comically riffing on Dickens' tale, or even repositioning it in a different city and century, this genuinely clever twist reshuffles the characters and reshapes the story. And it asks another fanciful but intriguing question that the classic never addresses: Why should only the living wield the prerogative to alter their fate? Because their livers held out longer or their kidneys kept kickin' for a few extra years? Here, earthly expiration is no reason you can't be a better soul throughout eternity and escape the flames of Hades (a direct rebuke of last week's No Exit).
As directed by Walter Niejadlik on a bare floor save for a stool and two-tier riser, his actors in street clothes using minimal props, this is theater by power of suggestion. An odd conceit in the script is distracting: Actors both act out their parts and narrate their characters' other actions, which could just as easily be performed. But Mula's play also twinkles with humor, the playwright planting witty gags and sharp retorts like little comic explosives, detonated with precision timing by this cast.
Their miming of physical gestures and bodily conditions—especially Cox's clenched hands around his imaginary chains—is a dramatic device inviting our minds to exert some effort and partner with the actors to fully realize the characters. His players entering and exiting through dual wings, Niejadlik uses each corner of the floor and all of the space between, the action constantly circling to provide all sides of the theater-in-the-round audience equal access.
Though his fit physique works against the depiction of a gnarled old miser and his booming bursts of outrage occasionally lapse into indecipherable shouting, Cox's Marley effectively evokes a tortured soul's torturous road to redemption. Contorting his body downward, his frame pretzeled into anguished slumps while painfully dragging his illusory physical burden, Cox's eventual transformation to outright joy in his newfound avocation of rescuing the lost and wayward is both believable and poignant. Harper, affecting an accent reminiscent of a chimney sweep from Mary Poppins and portraying Bogle as a cockney yenta, is a comic tornado, a source of near-constant delight and surprise.
Following up his triumph in Never the Sinner, the gifted Blosser, playing not only the Record Keeper but also Bob Cratchit and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, is a kaleidoscope of rich comic moments and dramatic heft. And Scott's Scrooge morphs entertainingly from wretched to redeemed (though, even with the actors in street clothes, Scrooge with an earring is pushing it).
Jacob Marley's Christmas Carol notches another solid entry for the more intimate Blackbox Theatre this season, along with Never the Sinner and The Turn of the Screw, while LVLT's mainstage has largely tanked with tacky Beau Jest and tepid London Suite. Perhaps the space's limitations force imaginative thinking. Perhaps the less formal setting invites the selection of riskier material. Perhaps minimalist theater forges experimental attitudes. Perhaps my underwear is too tight as I write this.
For whatever reason, it produces yet another reason for your patronage with Jacob Marley's Christmas Carol.
A Puppet Love Story? Talk to the Hand
Carnival! is a brain-stumper. Despite its Tony-winning status (1961), it's a musical rife with maddening contradictions and narrative holes, an awkward fusion of dark tones and light textures, spotty on character motivations and back stories, and climaxing with a ridiculously false love story that seems headed for spousal abuse. ... Otherwise, Nevada Conservatory Theatre's production of it isn't bad.
The musical adaptation of the 1953 movie Lili posits a naïve orphan (sweetly likable Rachel Rawlins Prescott) alone in the world when she can't locate her father's friend at a traveling carnival in France. But she joins the troupe, accumulating harsh lessons about life and love from the company's cynical roustabouts and lecherous predators. The harshest and strangest is taught by a glowering, bitter (and violence-prone) puppeteer (Steven Fehr), who magically melts into kindness and gentility when communicating to Lili through his puppets, falling in love—and talking her out of suicide—via his hand-controlled surrogates.
The cast contributes some strong performances, the score is lovely, the production looks grand, the costumes are sumptuous. But Carnival! never stops its storytelling Ferris wheel long enough to dazzle us with a little logic.
Carnival! (2 stars) Thu.-Sun., UNLV, 895-2787
Baby, Shmaby! It's Just Eddie Albee
If theater as hallucinogen is your preference, there's Test Market's The Play About the Baby, Edward Albee's staged Rorschach test, seemingly well-acted (by Chris Carrier, Stacia Zinkevich, Joel P. Wayman and Deanne Grace) directed (by JayC Stoddard) and executed. Seemingly because, like any inkblot scenario, there's no right or wrong answers to shoehorn Albee's absurd puzzle of a play into neat conclusions or even a sense of order.
The plot? Characters named Boy and Girl make Baby. Man and Woman come along to take Baby, who may or may not have even been born. In between come waves of Albeeian stream-of-consciousness monologues and dialogues teasing our comprehension of human behavior: cruel gamesmanship, life's comedy about to be trampled by tragedy, trivia masquerading as wisdom, reality squaring off against illusion. Some characters know they're in a play. Some don't. What we know is a riddle blossoming into more riddles.
Baby is an abstraction, as if it leapt off a Picasso canvas and onto the stage, daring you to examine it, mocking any attempt at definitive interpretation.
But it's a treat to try.
The Play About the Baby (3 stars) Thu.-Sat., Spring Meadows Presbyterian Church, 736-4313;
www.beckettfestival.com